Political systems govern partly by threatening citizens with demotion to bare life.

Evidence

A similar argument is made by Giorgio Agamben (1998) in his consideration of what he calls “bare life.” For Agamben, modern political systems and imaginaries are underscored by the capacity to strip individuals and groups of all social belonging and value and reduce them to a purely biological existence. Not only is this spectre of raw humanity a threat (“do what we say or else you too will be denuded”), it is also an image and a reality that reaffirm our (those of us fortunate enough not to be reduced to bare life) sense of worth and belonging to our imagined political community. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 220

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Agamben’s ‘bare life’ and its dual disciplinary functions.
• XREF: connects to: The administrative state produces unpolitical citizens within a political society — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2337; A government can manufacture crisis to construct its own people as enemy — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 111; The inability to treat stateless people as legal persons threatens all citizens’ legal equality (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The administrative state produces unpolitical citizens within a political society #expands (0.82) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2337
• A government can manufacture crisis to construct its own people as enemy #qualifies (0.80) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 111
• The inability to treat stateless people as legal persons threatens all citizens’ legal equality #exemplifies (0.78)
• State power depends materially on the bodies citizens lend it. #complicates (0.75)